While Marketing Automation will help you compare marketing channel effectiveness, beginning the buying process with some good insights beforehand about “what works&# for you already will give you a big leg up in qualifying vendors. For example, is Twitter giving you good leads already? And does sales agree with you that the Twitter leads are good? As Craig Rosenberg summarizes in this infographic  [link] , the marketing automation space is o n fire. Marketers are literally flooded with options for marketing automation.  1 What is your best source of leads today? MORE >>

One of the hardest things for us marketers to admit is that we all work in Sales. Or watch my Twitter feed as the insights roll out. First and foremost, it means WORKING CLOSELY with sales to define a qualified lead.  All those MBAs make us think we’re so smart that we sometimes lose sight of the simple fact that marketing is ALL about Sales.  That’s why I’m so glad to see my friends Gerhard and Larrisa Gschwandtner over at the Sales 2.0 Conference talking more and more about “Sales AND Marketing 2.0”.  Ever since I wrote the first Sales 2.0 marketer, come on down with me.  MORE >>

Make sure that you are buying a solution that will work well in your environment. Use Twitter, LinkedIn (your network), or Facebook groups, etc. It’s working for us and can work for you. I had the great pleasure of presenting at last week’s Cloudworld Conference at Moscone Center. Not surprisingly the subject was Cloud Computing—specifically “What to Look for and What to Look out for when Purchasing in the Cloud”. Great to see so much interest in the session and it’s certainly indicative that more companies are looking at making cloud-based purchases. Ease of use. MORE >>

To make this easier, you can add buttons to simplify sharing to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social networks. As an example, the Twitter button could link to [link] ”, which automatically creates a new tweet that links to the web version of your email message. This approach works best if your survey is very short or limited to just 1 question. In the past months, I’ve written a lot about best practices for email marketing. In this post I’d like to look at a couple of advanced email marketing techniques that can take email marketing to the next level. MORE >>

Genius has been putting those savings to good use and the team has been hard at work building some fantastic new features into the Genius platform like Search Engine Optimization , Landing Page Design , improved Business Intelligence, and Preference Management. The Genius Engineering and Design teams worked crazy hours preparing the product for live demos the week before and the weekend prior to Dreamforce kicking off. The hard work and dedication paid off in a big way. Wow what a week that was! To say the new application was well received is a massive understatement! MORE >>